Racism is a concern for many in the Western lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBTQ) communities, with members of racial, ethnic, and national minorities reporting having faced discrimination from other LGBT people.
In the United States, ethnic minority LGBT individuals may find themselves in a double minority, in which they are neither entirely accepted nor understood by mainly white LGBT communities, nor are they fully accepted by their own ethnic group. Many people experience racism in the dominant LGBT community in which racial stereotypes merge with gender stereotypes; for example, Asian-American LGBT people are often stereotyped by Westerners as more passive and feminine, while African-American LGBT people are stereotyped as more aggressive. A number of culturally specific support networks for LGBT people are active in the United States, such as "Ô-Môi", a support network for Vietnamese-American queer females.
Anti-Arab sentiment A report titled We're Family Too studied what it calls same-sex-attracted people from Arab backgrounds in Australia. The respondents were from both Christian and Muslim religious backgrounds. Many people in the Arab community spoke about ethnic stereotypes.
Some Mizrahi Jews and Arab Jews report exclusion and discrimination by the Ashkenazi LGBT community in Israel. Some LGBT Mizrahi Jews have alleged that aspects of Ashkenazi LGBT activism express "Ashkenazi hegemony" and leave "no legitimized cultural space for Mizrahi queers to express their Arab culture and heritage".
Anti-Asian and anti-Pacific Islander sentiment
In a study by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force on LGBT Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Americans, 82% of the surveyed participants reported experiencing racism from white members of the LGBT community. Another challenge that many Asian Pacific Americans who are LGBTQ must face is racism, in society at large and within the LGBT community. Sometimes, this is from overt discrimination; other times, it is the lack of Asian Pacific Islander representation.
British Asian gay men living in Yorkshire and elsewhere in northern England have reported increasing levels of racism and discrimination from white gay men. LGBT communities in ethnically diverse areas of the UK, such as Manchester and London, were found by the Naz Project to be more tolerant.
Asian American men are often represented in media, both mainstream and LGBT, as being feminized and desexualized. LGBT Asian men often report "sexual racism" from white LGBT men. The gay Asian-Canadian author Richard Fung has written that while black men are portrayed as hypersexualized, gay Asian men are portrayed as being undersexed. Fung also wrote about feminizing depictions of Asian men in gay pornography, which often focuses on gay Asian men's submission to the pleasure of white men. According to Fung, gay Asian men tend to ignore or display displeasure with other races but seemingly give sexual acceptance and approval to gay white men. Building off the work of Fung, Gilbert Caluya argues that media creates a "symbolic castration" among them. He also notes in his research, which interviewed gay men of Southeast Asian descent, that they were more likely to face covert racism from men of Anglo descent. In interracial gay male pornography, Asian men are usually portrayed as submissive "bottoms." The gay Asian male's penis is hidden and the focus tends to be on the curves of the body, which is a filming technique traditionally used for women. Racist stereotypes about gay Asian men, which include images of all gay Asian men as effeminate, having small penises, and as passive partners in terms of anal sex (bottoms), contribute to the anti-Asian sentiment within the gay male community.
Gay Asian men frequently experience racism on gay dating websites, where it is common for profiles to state a sexual preference for men of certain races, using phrases such as "No Asians", or "No fats, no femmes, no Asians". Some Asian gay men report being "relegated to the bottom of the attractiveness spectrum" due to "racial lookism", a combination of racism and lookism. White gay men are more likely than other racial groups to indicate "No Asians" when seeking partners. In many English-speaking countries, there is a strict racial hierarchy where white men are at the top and Asian men are somewhere far beneath. Senthorum Raj argues that "whiteness...becomes a privileged form desiring capital, enabling bodies that 'pass' as 'White', while marking out bodies which do not. Racial 'others' become produced in this economy of desire as fetishes or repugnant objects," and that Whiteness becomes the standard by which desirability is measured.
In a descriptive study conducted by Damien Riggs in Australia, he pulled samples of profiles from a gay dating site and analyzed the profiles for anti-Asian sentiment. His findings showed that anti-Asian sentiment takes on four different forms: "1. The construction of racism as 'personal preference'; 2. The construction of Asian gay men as not 'real men'; 3. The construction of Asian gay men as a 'type'; and 4. The assumption that saying 'sorry' renders anti-Asian sentiment somehow acceptable." Riggs explains that it is problematic to conflate racialized desire with personal preference, as "it constructs 'preference' and identity categories as equitable, which ignores the fact that gay Asian men do not choose their Asian identity." This also reduces gay Asian men to the category of an object or "kink" that can be adopted or cast aside at will.
An example of Riggs' third form of anti-Asian sentiment can take the form of the fetishization of gay Asian men and, thus, their objectification. White gay men who fetishize gay Asian men are given the label "rice queen." "Rice queens" view gay Asian men as the only possible objects of erotic interest and reduce gay Asian men to a category of an object.
Asian women are stereotyped as "passive but exotic," and lesbian Asian women report being stereotyped as "exotic" or viewed as not lesbian due to being Asian. "Yellow fever" is also cited as a concern among some Asian-American lesbians, along with sexual objectification. Lesbian Asian-Americans also face conflict in the intersectionality of their identities as lesbians and Asian-Americans. Asian women, particularly femme women, are perceived as "easy target[s]" for harassment by men due to their stereotype as feminine, docile, submissive, passive, and weak. Similarly, stereotypes of an Asian woman's appearance, typically femme, in contrast with a stereotypical lesbian's appearance—typically butch—exclude femme lesbian and bisexual Asian women.
Gay Asian American men in media Gay Asian American men have a stereotype of being feminine, as depicted in media such as the Grey's Anatomy episode "Where the Boys Are", which depicts an Asian American man as merely the spouse rather than his White partner, who is a soldier. Chong-Suk Han, one of the leading researchers of queer Asian Pacific American men, says that such images contribute to a cultural devaluation of gay Asian male sexuality. According to GLAAD, 86 percent of the LGBT characters shown during the U.S. 2008–2009 television season were white; 19 percent were of Asian descent—mostly minor roles. LGBT media articles, like Out Magazine's "How to Gab in Gaysian" published in February 2005, are seen as perpetuating a perception of Asian gayness as foreign and outside the norm.
Lesbian East and Southeast Asian women in media Lesbian East and Southeast Asian women are presented in more largely stereotyped, feminized roles, like Dragon Lady or China doll. Some support groups to combat these negative perceptions have been formed, like Yellow Kitties, an Australian-based LGBT organization.
Asian lesbian and bisexual women report a sense of invisibility in both LGBT community and U.S. culture as a whole, which is supplemented by a lack of representation of lesbian and bisexual Asian American women in mainstream media.
Many LGBT African American people report facing racism from the white LGBT community, leading some to repudiate labels such as "gay" and connections to white LGBT culture. The term same gender loving was coined by the activist Cleo Manago to describe people of African descent who are attracted to the same sex, as opposed to terms such as "gay/lesbian", "bisexual", or "queer". This term was meant to actively express pride in one's racial heritage.
Efforts to push gay rights forward alongside the black rights movement brought out opinions on their presence. Quotes by Frank Kameny include statements such as "Now that it is becoming unfashionable to discriminate against Negros, discrimination against homosexuals will be on the increase" and "no other Negros among the audience, but saw one [black person] disturbing [the] pamphlets."
Some Black gay men report discrimination and harassment from white gay men in gay bars and clubs. In the past, some gay bars would display signs that said "No Blacks, Fems, or Faggots", and similar phrases.
Some gay Black South African men have reported experiencing "grotesque racism" from white gay men during the time of Apartheid.
Chuck Knipp, a white gay male drag performer who is known for his blackface act "Shirley Q. Liquor", has been accused of racism. Responding to Knipp's declaration that the Liquor character "was created in celebration of, not to downgrade, black women","Shirley Q. Liquor Does Southern Decadence" , Southern Decadence Jasmyne Cannick said in her blog: "... it is not possible for Charles Knipp, a white man, to help heal years of mistreatment and racism at the hands of his people by putting on a wig, speaking AAVE , and in blackface ... There is nothing remotely uplifting about Knipp's act and I wish people would stop defending his character with the tired argument that he's trying to heal the nation. The only thing Knipp is trying to heal is the hole in his pocket by filling it with all of the money he makes off of degrading Black people."Cannick, Jasmyne. "Shirley Q. Liquor Update: A Response to the Blade Editorial "GLAAD's New Act" (blog entry), 23 February 2007
Struggling between two communities Clarence Ezra Brown III has researched ways gay black males feel in their black and gay communities. Gay black males are stuck between two communities they believe they do not fit into. According to Keith Boykin, "The dirty little secret about the homosexual population is that white gay people are just as racist as white straight people." Those who do not see themselves as part of the LGBT community see it to be a white community with white experiences.Boykin, Keith (1996). One More River to Cross. Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Anchor Books. Because gay black men face racism in the LGBT community, it is translating into the wider black community, meaning the only "support structures that speak to their perspective" continue to alienate them.
Sexual stereotyping Some authors, such as Howard Stevenson Jr. and Mary Dianne Plummer, have written that much of the racism against LGBT black people is rooted in sexual racism and the linking of sex role stereotypes and racial stereotypes. Black men who express a sexual preference for white men have been alleged to be suffering from "an insidious legacy of white racism" that causes internalized racism in black men. Some Afrocentric gay men are opposed to interracial relationships, believing gay black men who prefer white men lack strong roots in the black community or are oblivious to racism. The anti-interracial Afrocentrists believe that instead of "hating their blackness," gay black men should only date other gay black men. A slogan that promotes black-on-black gay relationships is "black men loving black men," which was popularized by Joseph F. Beam's anthology In the Life and the Marlon Riggs video Tongues Untied.